


The Probability of Change

by Lina (lookslikelove)



Category: Austin & Murry-O'Keefe Families - Madeleine L'Engle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-24
Updated: 2008-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:15:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1635938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookslikelove/pseuds/Lina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes big life changing moments don't look the way that you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Probability of Change

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick little treat, so if it feels a bit off I apologise for it! I just couldn't help myself as I wrote this.
> 
> Written for bardsong

 

 

When she was a child, she looked at her mother and saw the most perfect being. This, she had thought to herself, is what a woman _ought_ to be. No slave to her beauty or singular subject to her mind, Katherine Murry had everything and somehow managed to do it all, no complaints offered.

When she was a child, all Meg had wanted to be was her mother and at the same she wanted to be anyone but her. 

Adolescence is hard, it's a terrible thing that was probably invented by the cruel side of Mother Nature (Meg knows better than that, that a lot of what makes growing up hard are the people you grow up with). It made her miserable, it crushed her hopes of ever even being able to compare. It only took one look in the mirror to know that the girl she saw staring back at her, with glasses and awful teeth and even worse hair had a better chance of sprouting wings than comparing in the narrowest of ways to her mother.

In the vague reaches of her memory, she can recall a quote about changes coming when you least expect them. In she's not even certain if it's a real quote at all, but rather some jumble of words created to soothe the worries of her troubled teenage mind. All Meg really knows is that somehow it was right. Not pitch perfect, not even one hundred percent, but close enough to be just a bit uncanny.

Most people would say that the first night with the Mmes Ws and later with the mitochondria and the multiple Mr Jenkins would be best described as life altering, life changing events. That these events both on their own and all together changed her in ways that she could never begin to describe. 

Most of the time, Meg would be forced to agree. 

Still she knows that the extraordinary isn't what makes her special, and it has taken her a long time to come to grips with that. That the big, defining moments in her life happened on accident and yet she wouldn't have them any other way. These moments could be anything really, from Charles Wallace's first time speaking (full sentences, complete thoughts) to her first detention for throwing a punch that she still maintains was completely warranted. To meeting Cal, really meeting him and discovering that resenting him just like she resented everyone else in that town for looking down on her and her family was probably not called for. 

If made to pick, it's moments like those that she would fall back on. None of them might have the sparkle and shine of being wholly other-worldly, but they're normal enough to make the changes stick. She might have always wanted to be her mother growing up, longed to be that perfect, that put-together, that complete, but now that she's a mother she knows that being someone else isn't quite the same as being yourself. 

Don't get her wrong, there are still plenty of things she wishes she could do, that she wasn't confined by, but she went to a good college (both of them-undergrad and graduate), and she knows that she has time left. That sometimes big life altering moments come from watching your children grow up, from fixing cuts and correcting maths homework and generally just being there.

To wish things were different would taking away some of the good that she has. It could be worth, in a far off maybe sort of way, but most of the time, Meg is happy for she what she has. She may not have grown up to save the universe, to change the world in a single theorem, but who says that she won't? 

She certainly doesn't. It's the changes she didn't count on that she values the most and that's a mathematical certainty. 

 


End file.
